Dear residents,

Patch 1.0.22 has a few Season 2 changes that are more easily communicated via a full announcement rather than a dry changelog.

I tried as much as possible to keep the main plot of the main game and Season 2 chronologically separate. Gleaner Heights has earned a reputation of being too cryptic story-wise, but that is not entirely true: A new player who goes in blind does have enough time to figure out things on their own and beat the main story before it...expires, so to speak. The game was designed around that. Some players like going to the wiki and power through the game, finishing the main story before Year 1 even ends. Others take their time, enjoying their farming activities, and may eventually beat the main story at around Year 2. Others are just in for the farming and the romance. And that damn line about chickens and bananas. In any case, a newcomer should definitely not have to juggle two overlapping main plots at once. But the idea of making Season 2 happen a bit earlier (and then some more, under certain circumstances) was quite interesting.

This update makes some adjustments regarding when certain Season2 content appears. More precisely:

• Kranf arrives on Year 2, early Spring (used to be Year 3). This happens because a certain spouse quest depends on meeting Kranf and I'd like to make that quest available earlier.
  
• Similarly, the Flower Lady arrives on Year 2, mid-Summer (used to be Year 3). Now you get to plant flowers earlier! Woohoo!
  
• Chad arrives within the first few days of Year 3 (used to be a couple weeks later). This also means you get the motorcycle earlier, too.
  
• The new main plot kicks off on Year 3, mid-Spring (used to be about a month later).

But! For players who have beaten the vanilla main plot before the end of Year 2:

• Chad will appear as early as Year 2, late Summer and
  
• Celsus will appear as early as Year 2, early Fall, effectively kicking off the main plot in mid-late Fall of Year 2!

A lot of people ask me all the time, so no, you don't have to start a new game for these changes to apply. If you're already playing and you're touching some of these dates, end results may be off for an in-game week or so, but that's all.

Furthermore, I made a horrific discovery: Season2 Theater Man's performances were glitched! They didn't play, and the one who did probably had wrong dialogue! I fixed that, so now, when the main story of Season 2 kicks of, you can enjoy the Theater Man's spectacular new performances! Just be at the hotel's showroom on Winter 5, 15 and 25, between 7pm and 10pm !

That's all for now. Please do let me know if any issues occur. See you around!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1899580/Gleaner_Heights_Season_2/

• New farming features: Pigs, Trees, Flowers and Sprinklers.
  
• New townspeople
  
• Additional romancing options
  
• New tool upgrades
  
• New equipment and tons of new items
  
• New fish
  
• New cooking/Crafting recipes
  
• Unique Spouse quests
  
• A sprawling new main plot, its scope never seen before in the genre. Tons of new locations, enemies and bosses, puzzles and a gripping story that will chill you to the core.

Also, check out the Complete Edition Bundle!
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/25217/Gleaner_Heights_Complete_Edition/

Aloha!

Hoarding. The gathering and safekeeping of large deposits of material wealth, usually exceeding the physical needs of their owner. It drove history, gently rocking the cradle of proto-capitalist accumulation. It still happens around us. Why does it happen? Will it end? Under which circumstances?

Patch 1.0.19 has 2 important new things for you:

1. The storage chest in your house has 2 more tabs for items and tools.
   
2. Most item stack caps have been increased. For instance, "food" items have gone up to 5 from 4, and crops have gone up to 9 from 8 (barring "large" crops like watermelons).

This should alleviate any storage shortages. Stop throwing stuff around your house, you animals!

Please note that, although the item stack caps have gone up, your loaded games won't have your storage items magically rearranged to the new stack caps. You will have to move them around yourself. Sorry, I did the best I could do with the time I've been given to do it.

As an aside, I increased the in-game music quality from 128 to 192 Kbps.

As always, let me know how the new patch broke something and generally destroyed your lives.

Have a good one ♥

Dear residents of Gleaner Heights,

I hope you are all OK and in good health! It's been a while, but you'd better believe me when I tell you the wait will definitely be worth it!



This patch is codenamed Bridge Patch because it contains all necessary infrastructure changes to accommodate the upcoming HUGE expansion! But more on that later. For now, let's take a look at some noteworthy features this update offers:




The rendering system has been reworked, and now the game is rendered in a small area and everything is scaled up, instead of some elements being separately drawn scaled up in the system's resolution, breaking the illusion of a pixel art game. For instance, Winter snowflakes used to be drawn at a different resolution than the rest of the world. Now you can expect all pixels in the game to have the same size! The only thing that reserves the right to be drawn at a different resolution is the GUI. This is to ensure that it is always displayed in its entirety and it's not distorted by various aspect ratios. On typical cases (16:9 displays, 1080p), both game and GUI use the same resolution, so there is no discernible difference. Lastly, various different Scaling Options have been added when you are in Fullscreen mode, to ensure that the game scales without any distortions across all resolutions, in the way you prefer it!




You now have the ability to divorce a person you're married to. The reasons are your own. The paperwork can be purchased from the General Store. However, beware! If you don't communicate with your spouse much, they may get there first... but at least they will give you a warning talk when things are starting to get too cold. Would you do the same?




As of now, there are some "holes" in some places when you fish. That is, during certain seasons and hours, on certain places, you can only fish trash. This always annoyed me. The remedy was to rework the fish "schedules" and add 3 new fish types to increase variety. Fish that appeared during a certain season can be expected to continue doing so, but maybe they also appear in other times and places too.

For the grimy details, please refer to the next section, which is no other than...

Here is the full list of things added/tweaked and bugs squashed:
[expand type=details]

• Reworked the rendering system, now the game is true 1:1 pixel art style, no fake scaling. This also resolves the issue of lines appearing on the ground on some systems.
  
• Added Scaling Options in order to display the game perfectly in Fullscreen across all resolutions.
  
• You can now divorce your spouse. The relevant paperwork can be found at Jun's store when you are married. If you do divorce your spouse, don't expect to be able to romance them again...for now.
  
• Spouses can also leave you if your relationship is bad (you don't talk, don't give them gifts etc) for a long time.
  
• Added a few new fish types and reworked fish appearance timelines in order to ensure more variety and eliminate "dead" hours where only trash could be caught.
  
• Added the ability to adjust the message beep volume in the Options Panel.
  
• Changed default gamepad button usage to A = Interact and B = Run.
  
• Farm grid now shows where you can plant a seed, this will come in handy in the expansion because trees need a 3x3 tilled area.
  
• Reduced number of hearts by 1, now romance status should be displayed more accurately.
  
• Fixed forageable item duplication issues. This fix comes with a tiny cost: When you load a saved game to play, just once, there won't be any forageable items on the map. The next days will all be OK.
  
• Slightly altered a few item's values.
  
• Diamonds can now be found one mine floor earlier than usual.
  
• Craft menu recipes are now sorted by name.
  
• Slightly nerfed Stone Set stats & set bonus.
  
• Reworked tool stamina consumption per tool level.
  
• When you got out of a building and you spawned on top of the horse, it teleported back to the farm. Such scenarios are now handled more gracefully. Barring any extraneous occurrences, the horse now should be waiting nearby instead of teleporting back home.
  
• Changed Pier town upgrade completion time to 4 days.
  
• Many menus (crafting recipes, perks) are now in alphabetic order.
  
• Various minor audio/graphical tweaks/additions.

• Fixed cold weather affecting the player even indoors.
  
• Fixed Garry's schedule when married.
  
• Fixed a bug creating a player character duplicate in the house after a festival.
  
• Fixed fences hit with the hammer reappearing after reentering area.
  
• Fixed game crashing when pressing right on the last utensil in Utensil Selection panel and having less than 4 utensils.
  
• Fixed help menu crashing when pressing up on a certain occasion.
  
• Fixed a rare crash when generating a mine room.
  
• Fixed Ken sometimes overlapping Lazarus when inside their house.
  
• Fixed marriage not triggering when resting after Saturday midnight.
  
• Fixed waterfall sound sometimes being heard during cutscenes outside player home.
  
• Made relationship drop a bit faster if you don't talk to someone for some days (effect much stronger for spouses).
  
• Spouses now give birthday presents only if relationship is high.
  
• Fixed a scene involving Alice triggering when it shouldn't.
  
• Fixed being possible to put lit dynamite back into your backpack.
  
• Fixed marriage triggering on Saturday if staying up too late the previous day.
  
• Fixed using Health metrics to draw Stamina text in the Inventory's player info panel.
  
• Tweaked animal mood-related code, now mood cannot get as low as before so animals should be able to recover faster.
  
• Various other small fixes.

On some NVIDIA GPUs, some sprites may be rendered a bit glitchy (edge pixels cut off from one side, drawn double from the other). Hopefully the engine will be updated at some point to handle decimal positions more gracefully, like it (probably) did some time ago.
[/expand]




"Bah!" I hear you say, "This is all you've been up to all this time vdweller? Adding a few microupdates to a nanopatch to address some picoissues? Bah, I say! I thought you could do better!"

Yeah, hold your horses a bit there, dear residents. Because this is not all I've been cooking this entire time.

Season 2 is the upcoming major expansion for Gleaner Heights, developed furiously over the past 20 months. It contains tons of new stuff, flowers, trees, pigs, new townspeople with their own secrets and agendas, powerful tool upgrades and equipment, spouse-exclusive quests, new romance options, lots of new recipes and much more!



But the crown jewel of Season 2 is its main plot. You have never, ever played such a thing in another farming game before. Ever.



Prepare yourselves, dear residents, for you will travel across space and time, to uncover ancient secrets and obtain powerful artifacts.



Prepare yourselves, dear residents, for you will face foes more powerful than you ever have.



Prepare yourselves, dear residents, for the Nightmare brews, and the very existence of your town is at stake.



A full-featured announcement for Season 2 will follow soon. Until then, let me know about any issues with the update. The game's code has seen the most significant changes since release, so it's possible that new bugs have been introduced (and they escaped testing). As always, if you find a bug/glitch, let me know in the appropriate section in the Discussion forum, along with any error messages and steps on how it can be reproduced.

See you soon...really soon!

UPDATE: Season 2 Store Page is Live! Planned release date is March 24 ♥
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1899580/Gleaner_Heights_Season_2

Update 1.0.12 finally marks the transition of the game from Game Maker: Studio 1.4 to Game Maker: Studio 2. One of the benefits of this transition is that many parts of the code were re-written and further optimised. This means the game should run even faster on lower-end systems.

Another major thing added is a new input scheme which makes gameplay, especially with a gamepad, much more console-like and easier! New features include:

• Console-style menu navigation: No matter what your other in-game button settings are, menus are navigated with the d-pad or left stick, A selects something, B is for back (the "back" gamepad button still works too). Other keys may be used depending on the menu, their use and function is displayed like in the old system.
  
  
• Multi-context button functions: Dialogue can now be advanced by using all "face" buttons (A,B,X,Y). When holding an item, pressing the Use Tool button/key will also work for putting the item in your backpack.
  
  
• Left stick now works in all cases.

For those who will run the game for the first time with that new version, the new input system will be activated by default.

In order to avoid confusion and habit conflict, this new input system is deactivated by default for people who are already playing the game. in order to activate the new input scheme,it's simple:
Go to (hard disk):\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Gleaner_Heights and open settings.ini
Find the line InputScheme="0.000000"
and change it to InputScheme="1.000000"

As always, let me know if there are any bugs and glitches, especially any new ones introduced by the engine change that weren't present before.

Have fun!

I told you in an earlier announcement that I have been developing a smaller project. Well, here it is!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1007880/BALL/

This is a different game than Gleaner Heights, it is in fact a challenging puzzle platformer. Since many of you playas appreciated Gleaner Heights and are esteemed gentlefolk of old-school taste, I thought you may be interested in this.

The game will be live January 23 for the exorbitant amount of $5.99

On other news, porting Gleaner Heights to GameMaker Studio 2 is almost complete! There are a lot of code optimisations that should make the game run at least 50% faster in some areas. I will probably upload the build when it's ready on the Testing branch and make another announcement about it for all of you who want to try it and give feedback/bug reports before it becomes the default game build. The new engine will serve as the foundation for all subsequent content updates/bug fixing/expansions/console porting so it's important to take my time and do the best possible job with it.

Also, remember when I told you about Gleaner Heights being brought to some consoles? At the time, there was just Microsoft. Now, after some months, Nintendo also expressed interest for the Switch. Just keep in mind that since I have no prior experience with these things, I don't know whether there will be any insurmountable obstacles during each porting process. Maybe the deal will go bust in the certification section. Or Nintendo's age rating section. I really don't know how certain stages of porting work and I'm learning as I go. So take all that with a grain of salt.

When things become smoother and I'm close to releasing with them, I will resume adding content to the game. As I said, I have many ideas on what direction things could take. From more mysterious plots and new characters, to new areas to explore, boy this will be a hell of a ride!

Thanks for playing and supporting the game and I also appreciate your patience while I'm fiddling with the Big Guys' paperwork. Here's hoping it won't take long. You are all awesome. Have a good one.

Hi all!

I've not made any announcements since Summer ended, so I thought I'd drop you a line on what's going on about the game and in general.

First of all, I've been active on the game but not in a way that is visible to current players. I have begun the transition of the game from Gamemaker Studio 1.4 to version 2 which is quite more arduous than you might suspect (I know I suspected much less). The reason for this transition is not only to maintain the game's survivability since YoYo Games have officially cut support for previous versions of GameMaker, but also in order to make the leap to consoles as well.

Yep, you heard it right. Your boy vdweller is tripping 'round Popamole County.

This is a time-consuming process where there's a lot of back and forth with console companies, and this is why I've not been as visibly active in the past few months. I have some things I want to add to the game, or maybe even aggregate all those additions into a good, healthy-sized expansion pack, but I couldn't be in the middle of doing all that while some console PR person suddenly goes "Hey guy, you told us about your game, we want in, here's 3876 other things you have to do, how fast can you ship it?". That's the perks of working solo, folks.

Right now, I've been in touch with Nintendo (for the Switch) and Microsoft (for XBox One). Nintendo currently doesn't feel like cooperating (I have my theories), while Microsoft has approved the initial game concept. This is not an official announcement about the game definitely coming/not coming out on console X or Y, it's still quite early and there's still a lot to do. But yeah. Consoles.

In addition, I've been developing another, smaller game. Now honey, this isn't what it looks like! I'm not cheating you with giving my affections to another game. Honey I still love yOUCH OUCH OUCH

After such a big and taxing project like Gleaner Heights (took me only 18 months), I really needed some gear shifting, and I had to start fiddling with a smaller, simpler project, in order to keep whatever brain cells have been left intact from burning up.
Not many brain cells had been intact to begin with.

The new game is a 2D atmospheric puzzle platformer about a bouncing ball. It's a ball. It bounces. I'm not going for a BAFTA here alright?

Here's a couple work-in progress screenies, for your beautiful eyes only. This is actually the first time I'm going public with this. Please disregard the ugly placeholder ball graphic.

https://i.imgur.com/GifbODO.png
https://i.imgur.com/Oe815fx.png
https://i.imgur.com/1VUtqqX.png
https://i.imgur.com/GLdnNCS.png

It's in full HD, and all environments are hand-drawn and placed in a huge image instead of using tilesets. If you know any good mental institutions with a nice, clear mountain view, please drop me an email with info.

Anyways you probably deserve some medal for reading all this. I hope this whole console ordeal gets sorted soon so I can slip an update or two in the meantime. Thanks for reading this and for supporting Gleaner Heights in general. You are all amazing ♥♥♥ Have a good one.

Hi all!

It took some time but update 1.0.11 is finally here!

A major feature of this update is the addition of two new languages: Portuguese/Brazilian and Thai. Make sure you take a look at the game credits to see the awesome people involved with these translations!

Another notable feature is the addition of an item that will make getting out of the mines quicker and easier.

Finally, some people had requested a way to know in more detail how their relationship with townspeople progresses. Although I believe that such a feature would be detrimental to the game's tone, I nevertheless added it as an option. Who am I to poop on how you want stuff? The game's developer?

More details about those new features are in the patch notes below.

As always, let me know for any bugs/issues. Have fun!

===============================================

• Added Portuguese/Brazilian and Thai Languages.
  
• Added new item: Exit Mouse. This one-use item has a chance to appear every few mine floors and will instantly lead you back to the surface. It is removed when you get out of the mines, either by ascending normally or getting knocked out. If you don;t find the mouse on a particular mine floor, don't bother trying again the same day.
  
• Added an optional townspeople friendship tracker. The small dots appearing below their friendship/romance meter signify that a friendship event was unlocked. This feature can make or break your experience so before resorting to it, think carefully what kind of gamer you are and why you enjoy playing games. In any case, this feature can be activated/deactivated in the Options menu (it is OFF by default).

• Beefed up boss damage. For all bosses. Enjoy.
  
• Pressing Up/Down on the edge of menu lists now wraps selection.
  
• Fixed missing items when upgrading your house.
  
• Throwing a chick/chicken in water now properly kills it (lol)
  
• Various minor fixes.

Hi all, you sinful miscreants!

Go for a walk in the hunting grounds or the summit or other places, see what extra stuff you can discover each season!

And now for the changelog, I know how everyone can't wait to read them. Jesus Christ I'm literally yawning writing this.

• Fixed a cutscene triggering when Joshua's room is displayed on the main menu.
  
• Fixed flounders being ungiveable (lol)

• Added 5 new items, they are in effect seasonal crops you can find in various places.

NOTE: Due to the GUI being rendered differently to catch the vibrance shader, some users have reported only the GUI being visible and everyhting else being black.

If that's the case, you can temporarily roll back to a previous version by going to Game Properties -> Betas and where it says "Select the beta you would like to opt into" choose "Linux_testing". Don't be frightened by the name, it's OK for Windows. Everything should be OK now.

• Fixed a glitch in an event involving Tobias.
  
• Changed Bernadette's birthday to not coincide with another person's birthday.
  
• Fixed cranberry milkshake item sprite offset.
  
• Now holding interact while picking up nightflowers and mushrooms will place them in your backpack properly.
  
• Fixed chests opening but not acquiring item when inventory is full.
  
• Fixed boat sound playing while diving.
  
• Fixed Matilda incorrectly visiting the player's house.
  
• Fixed cabbage soup having 0 value.
  
• Fixed getting stuck when taking damage during horse dismount.

• Added a 5-level vibrance screen filter option which boosts color saturation.
  
• Added option to return to the surface from the last level's mine ladder. This does not open any permanent shortcuts, it's a 1-way trip.